Research

A fascinating and unexpected outcome of the recent high throughput studies of the mammalian genomes have been the discovery of thousands of long non-protein-coding transcripts. It has been recently shown that over 70% of the genomes of human and higher eukaryotes are transcribed, but only 1.5% of the human genome codes for proteins. The rest, which is the vast majority of the human genomic output, are non-protein-coding RNAs. The majority of these RNAs are long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), mysterious and exciting molecules which remain mostly unstudied. It is becoming increasingly evident that these RNAs are playing highly critical roles in the cell, and recent data suggests that they form highly complex regulatory pathways that have made the enormous complexity of human body possible. In fact, there are some reports that suggest that these RNAs are responsible for us, humans, being different from other primates!
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